Traditionally, control of quality of service (QoS) within telecommunications networks has been achieved using a combination of best-effort data delivery, network resources reservation, or data packet marking on data communication paths. However, the design of emerging next generation network (NGN) architectures (e.g., Internet protocol (IP) multimedia subsystem (IMS) and long term evolution (LTE)) will render this approach no longer viable. One feature of network topology within the various NGNs is that the signaling required to negotiate a data transfer (e.g., application signaling) may not travel on the same logical path as the actual data transfer itself (e.g., data traffic). Therefore, a policy entity is needed to link the application signaling on the service plane to data traffic on the transport plane in order to allow applications to request QoS to be performed on the traffic plane.
One example of such a policy entity is a policy and charging rules function (PCRF). The PCRF, or policy engine, generally is a policy decision point that may be centrally located in the network and may communicate with access edge devices (e.g., policy enforcement points), applications, and operational support systems/business support systems (OSS/BSS) platforms to manage subscriber and network information according to policy rules. These policy rules may be used to define how broadband network resources should be allocated to subscribers and applications and under what conditions. Policy rules may encompass the business and technological rules that govern which network services a subscriber can access, at what bandwidth level, when, and for how long. The PCRF may identify appropriate policy rules by querying a subscription profile repository (SPR) for relevant policy information.
Some policy and charging control (PCC) architectures allow the PCRF to interact with several SPRs. These multi-SPR systems typically operate under the assumption that policy information for a subscriber is to be found in its entirety at a single SPR and is indexed or accessed by a subscriber identifier, such as a mobile subscriber ISDN number (MSISDN). As a result, the set of policy rules applied to the subscriber is always controlled by the same entity and is independent of the services or network that the subscriber is accessing.
Accordingly, in light of these difficulties, a need exists for methods, systems, and computer readable media for service data flow (SDF) based SPR selection.